Blackout in Logan Square

Around 10:00 PM last night, the power began to flicker in our apartment. The whole apartment would go dark, then come back to life, then go dark again after a few seconds.

Liz and I jumped up, and started turning off what we could – a nearby AC unit, lights, anything we could get to in the dark. After a few minutes, we realized the lights were going to stay off for an indefinite period.

So we lit some candles, and more or less sweated things out for a while. Within an hour, ComEd got the power back on (although there was a small, false start). Liz was correct in her prediction that the power’d be back on within 45 minutes (I was less optimistic, and claimed midnight… which ended up matching the official ETA from ComEd).

But here’s one thing I got right – I predicted that when the power came back, we’d see things working for a bit, before everything would go dark again. My hunch was that other people, like us, immediately turned off things when the power first went out. When it returned, my guess is a whole bunch of folks would start turning things on again.

Sure enough, when the power flickered back… it stayed on for about 20 seconds, and then went out again. But pretty soon after that, the power came on for good, for the rest of the night.

Thanks to ComEd for being so quick about getting things up and running again. Here’s hoping others in the area got their power back around the same time.

Looking back, it’s amazing how dependent we are on electricity. I was going to surf the web using my iPad, but realized it’s dependent on our local WiFi conncetion (which runs off our router, which runs off of electricity). So all we had were our cellphones. Also pretty surprised how dependent I was on that guy, during the outage.

Related:
Storm and a Blackout, 2008
SOPA/PIPA Blackout
Earth Hour 2011: Photos Before And After
Earth Hour: An Hour Without Lights